Abstract

It’s unbelievable – I bought this tiny little storage from Seagate and I had to learn it the hard way that I do not have control over my files. One would think that a storage which offers RAID provides the ultimate security for your data. And when a hard drive fails, you just replace it, disaster avoided. All true, but what Seagate does not mention on this product’s web site is to NOT NAME YOUR FOLDERS   “.tb” – otherwise you cannot delete those.

Well, in this case, I even was not the scapegoat towards myself, it was my client operating system. Folders named .tb are being created when an OS such as MS Windows tries to store preview images (aka thumbnails aka tb) for a specific folder. That’s why it may be the case that when there’s lots of media on the NAS you might have lots of .tb folders.

Support?

So I wanted to post my question into a forum and discovered there were already numerous questions on that topic, all not really answered, especially not by the official Seagate Support. That’s why I submitted a Service Request to Seagate explaining my problem. Their answer was just ridiculous, the solution was supposed to be the following:

1. Create a new share that is nearly named as your old share (e.g. old: video, new: videos)
2. Copy over all data from the old share to the new one and omit the .tb folders
3. Delete the old share

Sorry about the term “ridiculous”, but as a customer of a high tec device I can expect a professional solution which would be a firmware update resolving the issue. This cannot be that difficult to resolve. Instead, push the device to the market and do not care about any design flaws. I think in this case, Customer Service still has a lot of potential for lessons to learn.

Solution!

1. Remove the SATA drives from the NAS and connect them to any computer. You will need SATA ports on that. Make sure the BIOS sees the drives.
2. Boot that computer with a Live Linux distribution (any distribution will work, I’ve used CentOS)
3. Execute these commands:
   $ mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
   mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 2 drives.
   $ mkdir /mnt/md0
   $ mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0
   $ echo “ssh stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/dropbear dropbear -i” >> /mnt/md0/etc/inetd.conf
4. As the often mentioned default password ‘atsahs’ did not work for me, I’d suggest the following:
   Edit /mnt/md0/etc/shadow   to reset root’s and remove the encrypted password between the colons. DO NOT DELETE MORE. The resulting line for root should look like this:
   root::14783:0:99999:7:::
5. Execute these commands:
   $ umount /mnt/md0
   $ mdadm -S /dev/md0
6. Shut down the Live Linux and move the two drives back to the NAS
7. Start up the NAS and ssh over to your NAS
   ssh root@<NAS-IP>
8. Set your new root password

Now you can cd to your shares under /shares and do whatever you want, e.g.

find -type d -name .tb -exec rm -rf {} \;

This fails on some directories that contain spaces in their names, but you’ll be able to take care of them manually.

Next step would be to find out how deleting .tb folders can be enabled. Playing around with a few smb.conf options, which I can edit now.

PS: Sorry, aber dieser Artikel ist mal in Englisch, weil eine Menge Leute im Seagate-Forum das gleiche Problem haben und diese eben auf Englisch gefragt haben.